In our current research, we're interested in dissolving the stage itself. This means saying goodbye for the time being to the traditional set relations between performer and viewer. We're not trying to do this in a forced way, as many 1960's theatrical experiments that "democratized" the stage did by pulling spectators over the proscenium and onto the stage itself. We're after something much subtler, designing situations and events where unpredicted spatial and social conventions emerge out of locally-situated actions.
Performance
One of the themes threading through our experiments, since M1 (1997), has been the question, what constitutes performance?By performance we are interpolating between several senses of performance, starting with very ordinary gestures: drawing a hand across a chalkboard or shaping a piece of mud, walking out of a store and tossing something into a trash container. What do you have to do with such gestures before they will be marked (perceived) as pre-scripted performance? In M1, we played with different ways to mark a gesture -- repetition,geometry of bodies, ignoring ambient intentions, etc. We amplified and diminished gestures across the thresholds of performance. We have taken this question much farther in M2 (1998) and now M3 (1999-2002).
M3
We are designing our current work, M3, as a funhouse with multiple spaces and each of the spaces answers the question about conventions in very different ways. The three rooms are Puzzle, Sauna, and the T-Garden. The Puzzle is a maze of discrete rules,conventions, and choices. You enter and are confronted with a direct physical challenge: travel through this space and exit. But everything you do inevitably complicates not only your space but also your neighbors'space. Furthermore,as in the Coliseum, your fellow "citizens" watch the game from above as you try to navigate and solve this challenge. Puzzle is a spatial nightmare: you fall into a world of rules that you must learn and use in order to escape. Space is conventionalized in the Puzzle from the history and mythology of labyrinths mazes, panopticons and coliseums.
The second room, the Saunas, is a series of individual chambers, each having their own unique media systems and states. These chambers, which function like tollbooths between the spaces of the Puzzle and the T-Garden, are pleasure machines that the players have to pass through. They explore the polarities between sensory overload and deprivation, vision and hearing, and peripheral versus foveal attention. Each has its own spatial characteristics which suggest cleansing rooms, baths, saunas-places you can go to slow down go to heighten the senses and sweat out the media toxins that clog your perceptual experience every day. In some of the chambers the players have to lie down, in others, their bodies are immobilized by the architectural conditions of the room. For the most part, each of the players is alone in these chambers.
In the last environment of the T-Garden, however, we also ask the question of how spatial conventions arise. When players get to the T-Garden, after passing through the "veil" of the Saunas, there is less of an identifiable external frame (such as theater, gallery or amusement park) within which the players can structure their experience. Instead, the conventions are internal to the space itself, a dynamically unfolding scaffolding rather than a frame or a hard exoskeleton. When you enter the T-Garden, you gradually become conscious not only of yourself but also of how others around you affect the environment and consequently,your experience.
For example, normally we are not particularly conscious of body-space, but when we walk into the T-Garden where our clothing begins to interfere with the media dynamics of the room,we suddenly become conscious of proximity. The air grows thick with sound, visual texture and tension. We become conscious of our clothing as a skin to us. This is one way we investigate the emergence of the sense of spatiality and felt meaning in the course of gesture and action.
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